Web3 = payment renaissance

The attention economy and the internet’s original sin

At the heart of the story of how the internet broke the media business model is the simple fact that the internet was not built to facilitate the flow of money. Payments weren’t built into the internet’s infrastructure—it was considered too risky. Marc Andreessen called this “the original sin of the internet.”

The lack of payment infrastructure is the reason why so much of the internet is monetized via advertising. Rather than requiring users to pull out a credit card and type their information into a website, users could be monetized frictionlessly and indirectly, paying not with their money but with a different asset: their attention. That precipitated a shift in power from the old gatekeepers of media who controlled content creation and distribution—the publishers, record labels, and movie studios—to those who amassed consumer attention at scale.

Source: https://li.substack.com/p/the-web3-renaissance-a-golden-age